Quote:
Originally posted by Not Me
My understanding from reading the older studies is that they did not even look at the effects of bad marriages on children. The older studies only looked at the differences between children of divorce vs. children from intact marriages. Newer studies have attempted to separate out high-conflict parental relationships from low-conflict parental relationships and see if it is the conflict level or the marriage/divorce that is best correlated with the happiness/adjustment/mental health of the children.
From all that I have read on this topic, I believe that divorce is a just a proxy for a high-conflict parental relationship, and that it really is the quality of the parental relationship that matters. I believe that it is better for the children if two people who cannot have a happy marriage together divorce and then make happy lives for themselves and then get along with each other while continuing to raise the kids. The problem is that all too often, they divorce and continue to have this miserable relationship with each other, which continues to scar their children. In that situation, where they divorce and continue on in a high conflict relationship, maybe it would be better if they stayed married. But if they can divorce and remarry and be happy and that will stop the conflict, that is better than to stay married to each other in a high-conflict marriage.
Here is another abstract from the same author on this topic:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...&dopt=Abstract
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You are unnecessarily limiting options here. If there is irresolvable conflict between two people, it strikes me that neither divorce nor continued marriage under an increasingly tattered white flag is a complete solution. The conflict will continue.
A simple solution is to remove the source the conflict, in this case, one of the spouses. There are people who can take care of this.
(Damn, Bilmore beat me to it. I need to adopt his approach of posting before thinking.)
